By Human Rights Graduate Student, Tom Shakely
Since seven men on the U.S. Supreme Court imposed the violence of abortion on America’s body politic, the March for Life has been a consistent annual witness in Washington, DC to a culture of life and a politics of justice.
Americans became broadly comfortable with abortion only subsequent to Roe’s implicit lesson that abortion was not only acceptable but could also be seen as a legitimate good. Decades of public opinion polling on abortion and what Americans have, in unfortunately significant numbers, come to believe about abortion, underscores the inherently cultural and political role of the Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court is the nation’s highest judicial body, the judiciary necessarily influences and shapes the nation’s political, cultural, and moral conscience. If the law is a teacher, Supreme Court justices represent our most vaunted educators. Thankfully, on the issue of abortion, Americans have been neither pliant nor eager to accept the Court’s toxic lessons as if the issue were settled—as if a majority vote could make moral what reason alone can discern as immoral. In this way, the March for Life represents a testament to the triumph or Americans’ moral sense, and to their discernment of natural law principles, over and against the positivism and relativism of Roe, Casey, and their progeny.
The March for Life represents a wholesale rejection of the “syllabus” of the Court on abortion and issues of human dignity more broadly. There is arguably no greater, more sustained, more youthful, or more hopeful annual political demonstration in the world for human rights than America’s March for Life. Indeed, although Roe led to the March, the March today has expanded into cities and states across the country and throughout the year and inspired similar marches internationally. Increasingly, there seems to be an awareness that the March for Life is growing beyond the issue of Roe—that after Roe’s inevitable, albeit already long delayed reversal, the value and power of the March will remain undiminished whether as a celebration of human life across the spectrum of life issues and triumph over the scourge of abortion, or as a continuing witness to the need for the Court or federal lawmakers to definitely abolish abortion as a matter of justice.
What has made the March, and the issue of abortion, a “live wire” where in so many other nations the issue is less politically relevant? While some might point to America’s federalist system, and our separation of powers, as definitive factors in distinguishing between American attitudes on and prioritization of abortion versus those in parliamentary systems, for example, the March for Life and its hopeful yet visceral message offers a more compelling answer: abortion does not remain a preeminent political issue chiefly due to America’s political system, but rather simply due to the extreme nature of Roe and subsequent rulings. Whereas European nations generally project human life within roughly the first trimester, America has offered functionally no protection—even to the point of partial birth, until a relatively late date. The extreme nature of America’s morally calamitous experiment with abortion has naturally led to an extreme counter witness motivated by love and hope to the inherent dignity and worth of every human life in the form of the March for Life. Alongside the March, and throughout each year, law and policy initiatives and political and judicial combat take place to carry forward the momentum of the March and, in effect, to put its principles into practice.
How simple it would have been, after the injustice of Roe, for Americans to resort to similarly extreme and barbaric acts in retaliation. John Adams, in his famous 1770 defense of the British perpetrators of the Boston Massacre, urged the jury to stay true to “the dictates of reason and truth,” by cautioning that if one allows oneself to be “borne away by a torrent of passion, we make shipwreck of conscience.” The March for Life, in a singular and sustained way, has harnessed the torrent of passion of Americans at the injustice of Roe, tempered that passion through reason and truth, and continues through its hopefulness, its peacefulness, and its plain persistence, to steer the American ship of state toward the promise of calmer waters.
